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(Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

By all historic accounts, the actual idea for the sequester—the massive front-loaded cuts to the federal budget designed to rip a hole in spending programs near and dear to both Republicans and Democrats—originated in the Obama White House.

By creating a mechanism that would result in huge cuts to a defense budget that has long been sacrosanct to modern day Republicans, along with equally large cuts to the entitlements that Democrats feel duty bound to protect, the Obama Administration believed that it had created a tool that would force a negotiated solution in the effort to get a grip on our debt situation through the balancing of spending cuts with revenue increases.

As a weapon to drive compromise—a concept that has become a four letter word in today’s extreme environment— the sequester wasn’t such a bad idea. Surely, any rational legislator in Congress would understand that reaching a negotiated deal was far preferable to the unacceptably painful results of allowing the sequester to take hold.

Or would they?

Having ultimately realized that their efforts to hold the nation hostage by threatening a tumble over a fiscal cliff—or freaking us out over the dire consequences that could result from failing to raise the debt ceiling—would only result in a one way ticket to political Palookaville, Congressional Republicans have now latched on to a new strategy—allow the sequester to actually go forward, sit back and watch as all those mandatory spending cuts cause millions of jobs vanish into the ether and then blame it all on Obama.

You see, it’s not that the Republicans don’t understand the damage the sequester will do to an economy whose recovery is just now taking hold. Rather, it is that Republicans have resolved to permit the terrible results of the sequester because they have convinced themselves that—since the idea originated over at the White House—it will be the President who will suffer the severe political consequences that will surely result—consequences Congressional Republicans believe will grant them a considerable political advantage even if achieved through the pain of their fellow Americans.

Yet, blaming the President for what is to about to happen would be like blaming Karl Benz, the inventor of the automobile, for the terrible things that occur when a drunk gets behind the wheel of car.

Certainly, Mr. Benz could have foreseen the potential dangers of someone using the machine he created in a way that he would never have intended. But do we blame Mr. Benz for a traffic fatality when some bonehead who has had too much to drink gets in the driver’s seat or do we blame the idiot who does extreme damage to another’s life by using Benz’s idea as a weapon of destruction?

Similarly, while the White House may have given birth to the idea of sequester, that idea can only become an ugly reality if executed by the Congress.

So, while the Congressional Republicans are correct in their expectation that the party ultimately blamed for what is to befall the nation as a result of the sequester will pay a very serious price indeed, they badly misjudge the situation by imagining that they can pin this on the President.

No matter how many times the GOP attempts to remind us that this was all the President’s idea—something Speaker Boehner did five distinct times on Tuesday alone—it will forever be John Boehner and his GOP cohorts in Congress who will have put the keys in the ignition and their collective foot on the gas pedal—and the American public will know it.